VirtualBox – The Best Virtual Machine for Windows

Posted by Joel 15 November, 2008
Share/Save/Bookmark

Testing has been a daily habit of my life, since I test a lot of software I do not test them on my live OS (which is Vista SP2 beta), I rely on Virtual Machines to do all the testing and to check out new OS without any harm to my OS or partition.

There are three leading Virtual Machine Software, form three software giants in the IT industry. Below are the three products.

  1. Virtual PC 2007 (from Microsoft)
  2. VMware Workstation (from VMware)
  3. VirtualBox (from SUN Microsystems)

Here is a short comparison of the three in terms of few aspects I could come up with:

Comparison Factor

Virtual PC 2007

Virtual Box

VMware

Price FREE FREE USD 189.00
Host Support (Operating System where VM will be installed) Windows Vista Only (XP and older versions require Virtual PC 2004) Windows Vista, XP, 2000
Sun Solaris
Linux
Mac OSX
Windows Vista, XP, 2000
Linux
Guest Support (Operating System which will be installed on the VM) Only Different Versions of Microsoft Windows. Different Versions of Microsoft Windows
Linux
Solaris
Unix
Mac OSX
Different Versions of Microsoft Windows
Linux
Mac OSX
Virtual Machine Addons (Drivers for better performance of Guest OS) Interacts between Guest and Host Available Available Available
Performance (out of 5) 3 5 4
ISO Capture Available Available Available
Direct USB Support Not Available Available Not Available
Drag and Drop Files Not Available Available Available
Networking Available but does not work with the host. Available and works perfectly. Available but sometimes throws’ errors.
Management Console User Friendliness (out of 5) 4 5 2
Virtual Disk Management Easy Very Easy Hard
Overall Rating (out of 10 where 1 being worst and 10 being best)

5

9

7

The Verdict

After 2 weeks of testing, I have come to the below conclusions.

VMware is quite good but not worth all the money, not worth at all.

Virtual PC 2007 is ok but I have got tired of it due to the lack of features, especially the networking problem and the lack of USB support and the support to install a variety of guest OS. I have switched to VirtualBox.

This I believe is the new king of Virtual Machines, and it has features and performance better than the paid Virtual Machines.

View some VirtualBox screen shots

Get VirtualBox Here

Categories : Apps Tags : , , , ,

Comments

Hi, I wonder why you wrote that VPC 2007 will work only on Vista Systems. I have VPC 2007 installed on Windows XP SP2.

What do you think about the free emulator qemu which is very fast but has no gui?

Commented by theschneidi Reply
on November 15, 2008

yes Virtual pc 2007 does work on XP now…earlier it did not and networking is very easy in virtual pc once you get the hang of it

Commented by blacknoise Reply
on November 15, 2008

Virtualbox is the best vm imho.

It blows vmware away.

Commented by Marik Reply
on November 16, 2008

Though I’m new to virtualization, and I do agree that at present, Virtualbox is better than the other two, I do find some of your conclusions questionable. One might even say inaccurate. For example, Virtual PC 2007 DOES support file drag and drop; I have no problem networking with the HOST operating system, and I am presently running Virtual PC 2007 on Windows XP PRO SP3.
Like I said, I prefer Virtualbox, however a comparison should report facts only.

Commented by Ekun Reply
on February 3, 2009

Yes, Virtual PC 2007 does support drag and drop between host and guest and vise versa. On the other hand, VirtualBox does NOT support that function even in the latest version which at the moment of writing this post is 2.1.4.

Please post facts and not try to make a software look better by posting inaccurate information.

Commented by Mark Reply
on February 18, 2009

Yes Mark and Ekun are correct about that. VPC 2007 DOES support drag and drop when VPC addons are installed and virtual box doesn’t.

And networking has no problems either

However i think you are using the final version of VPC 2007, I was talking about the version when vista was released(VPC 2007 beta). It was released because VPC 2004 did not support vista as a guest or host O/S. (this version was buggy with XP SP2 and didn’t install in some machines also had trouble with some processors), which was later improved with the final version.

changes in that version was
Support for hardware virtualization
Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system
Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system
Support for 64-bit host operating systems(with VM’s being 32-bit)
Support for ISO images larger than 2GB

but still I find VPC easier to work with :D

Commented by blacknoise Reply
on February 18, 2009

:arrow: about the error: Wizard can you please correct it

Commented by blacknoise Reply
on February 18, 2009

Thanks for doing this comparison, saves me a lot of trouble downloading and trying one by one. Now I am of to download VirtualBox!

Commented by Rosdi Reply
on May 6, 2009

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

(required)

(required)